create a calculator story item type about smallest-federated-wiki HOT 8 CLOSED

What about using a browser based spreadsheet - or its syntax?

for eg:

• http://visop-dev.com/lib/jquery/jquery.sheet/jquery.sheet.html
• I'll cry about the death that wikiCalc seems to have come to - though as the 1.0 codebase is still out there...

in essence, your expense calculator can be implemented as a spreadsheet table/grid - and your expenses example would be a page that contains several of these tables, with some kind of =SET and =GET to access values outside the current table.

oh, yes, I do want that :)

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I'm hesitant to even think in spreadsheet terms. I'm a great fan of them in that they provide the only end-user programming environment where new models are routinely built and then important decisions are based on their predictions. The problem is that they have been too successful. You can't borrow even a little from spreadsheets without pretty much having to implement everything and then you just end up with one more bad spreadsheet program.

Some things that spreadsheets don't do particularly well that I would like to tackle eventually:

• units calculations
• non-scalar values
• modularity (exploiting refactoring & federation)

There are awesome calculators out there ranging from Google Calculator to Wolfram Alpha. I've suggested starting with a 20-line implementation, not because it is powerful, but because it would integrate easily and point in a direction.

(I've now looked at jquery.sheet and agree that there is a lot to like.)

from smallest-federated-wiki.

This is a very interesting idea. I am taking a crack at something similar to the awk calculator. You enter numbers or simple algebraic expressions and can give them names if you wish. I see it being useful for two purposes: 1. a scratch pad to do math while reading articles. 2. a format for presenting "arguments" in the form of calculations that are part of articles.

Some other inspiration for the future comes from Soulver (http://www.acqualia.com/soulver/) and Bret Victor's Scrubbing Calculator: (http://worrydream.com/ScrubbingCalculator/), of which I am also trying to build a browser version.

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I've ported the awk script which nows runs in javascript on the client side. See http://home.c2.com:1111/view/expense-calculator

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cool! You seem to be having altogether too much fun :)

On 11/11/11 08:57, Ward Cunningham wrote:

I've ported the awk script which nows runs in javascript on the client side. See http://home.c2.com:1111/view/expense-calculator

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Well, I had fun on that ski trip in 1981. Did you notice the price of a fill-up back then? Also the lift tickets look expensive at $48 but that was for a week of the best tram skiing in the country.

Try changing some numbers. The calculator feels spread-sheet like except that cells have names, not numbers, and the flow of information is always down the page.

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I really like the way the calculator works. I wonder if we could build "inline" editing instead of the way you currently have to edit the whole textarea to make editing less disruptive and to see the changes happening real-time.

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I wanted to keep the calculator simple so that it is easy to experiment with manipulation. Like you, I am inspired by http://worrydream.com/ScrubbingCalculator/

My first thought this morning was to make the editor's textarea scroll to the point where one double-clicks. Although this is the right thing to do at some point, I don't believe such optimization is on the path to important discovery.

We're better off exploring (and organizing) event-oriented interplay between data, calculation, and visualization within the context of the modern dom.

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